The   Recovery   of  the 
Ancient    Orient 

Robert   William   Rogers 


Dfl? 


Where'er  we  tread  'tis  haunted,  holy  ground, 
No  earth  of  thine  is  lost  in  vulgar  mould. 

— Byron. 

The  grand  object  of  all  traveling  is  to  see 
the  shores  of  the  Mediterranean. 

— Johnson. 

Here  thou  behold'st 

Assyria,  and  her  empire's  ancient  bounds, 
Araxes  and  the  Caspian  lake;  thence  on 
As  far  as  Indus  east,  Euphrates  west, 
And  oft  beyond;  to  south  the  Persian  bay, 
And,  inaccessible,  the  Arabian  drouth: 
Here,  Nineveh,  of  length  within  her  wall 
Several  days'  journey,  built  by  Ninus  old, 
Of  that  first  golden  monarchy  the  seat, 
And  seat  of  Salmanassar,  whose  success 
Israel  in  long  captivity  still  mourns; 
There  Babylon,  the  wonder  of  all  tongues, 
As  ancient,  but  rebuilt  by  him  who  twice 
Judah  and  all  thy  father  David's  house 
Led  captive,  and  Jerusalem  laid  waste, 
Till  Cyrus  set  them  free. 

— Milton 


THE    RECOVERY 

OF  THE 

ANCIENT    ORIENT 


BY 
ROBERT  WILLIAM  ROGERS 

Ph.D.  (Leipzig),  Litt.D.,  LL.D./F.R.G.S. 

Professor  in  Drew  Theological  Seminary 


NEW   YORK:  EATON    &    MAINS 
CINCINNATI:  JENNINGS  &  GRAHAM 


Copyright,  1912,  by 
ROBERT  W.  ROGERS 


To 
S.  B.  C. 

AND 

E.  M,  C. 

LAKE  GENEVA 
JULY 
1911 


261^50 


FOREWORD 

On  June  17,  1912, 1  had  the  pleasure 
of  delivering  the  annual  Phi  Beta 
Kappa  address  at  Allegheny  College, 
Meadville,  Pennsylvania,  which  I  now 
have  the  temerity  to  commit  to  type. 
I  shall  not  blame  this  boldness  upon 
any  of  the  kind  and  generous  hosts 
who  politely  commended  this  course, 
but  assume  the  responsibility  alone, 
and  thank  them  only  that  they  in- 
vited me  in  the  first  instance,  and  then 
so  kindly  heard  me.  I  have  not  re- 
written the  words  in  such  a  form  as 
sober  art  demands.  They  stand  as 
they  first  were  spoken.  Here  are  all 
the  innocent  little  arts  and  tricks  of 
the  man  who  speaks  to  the  ears  of 
men,  and  would  fain  induce  them  to 
listen  even  upon  a  warm  summer's 
evening.  Let  the  reader  remember 
this,  take  the  little  book  in  the  spirit 
of  its  purpose,  and  destroy  it  not  with 
harsh  criticism,  lest  I  threaten  him 
with  the  words  of  Hazlitt,  which  are 
these:  "Those  who  would  proscribe 
whatever  falls  short  of  a  given  stand- 
7 


S  FOREWORD 

ard  of  imaginary  perfection,  do  so 
not  from  a  higher  capacity  of  taste  or 
range  of  intellect  than  others,  but 
to  destroy,  to  'crib  and  cabin  in/  all 
enjoyments  and  opinions  but  their 


own." 


ROBERT  W.  ROGERS. 


Madison,  New  Jersey, 
July  17,  1912. 


THE  RECOVERY  OF  THE 
ANCIENT  ORIENT 

MEMBERS  OF  THE  ANCIENT  AND 
URBANE  SOCIETY  OF  PHI  BETA  KAPPA, 
LADIES  AND  GENTLEMEN: 

By  your  kind  and  flattering  invita- 
tion am  I  come,  and  by  my  own 
choice  am  I  to  speak  of  the  only  sub- 
ject to  which  I  may  claim  to  have 
right  of  public  utterance.  The  field 
of  human  knowledge  has  sensibly  wid- 
ened since  those  large  days  in  1776, 
when  some  of  our  forebears  fought 
to  found  a  new  commonwealth,  while 
others,  even  amid  rumors  of  war  in 
the  distracted  colonies,  dared  to  meet 
and  found  a  learned  society.1  They 
were  men  who  might  hope  to  compass 
the  field  of  learning  a;s  none  may  dare 
in  these  days,  least  of  all  one  whose 
whole  life  has  been  given  to  a  field 
circumscribed  within  narrow  limits. 

When  our  society  was  founded  the 
word  "Orient/'  or  the  "East,"  meant 
simply  the  lands  about  the  eastern 
Mediterranean,  and  the  extent  of  the 

9 


10  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

territory  both  westward  and  eastward 
was  vague  indeed.  In  our  day  the 
word  "East"  has  swept  its  wide- 
flowing  net  to  inclose  far  distant 
China,  Japan,  and  the  islands  of  the 
Pacific  from  icy  Saghalien  to  fragrant 
Singapore.  But,  strange  to  say,  as 
the  term  has  widened  eastward  it  has 
lost  westward.  I  scarce  venture  to 
say  what  our  founders  would  have 
set  as  the  western  limits  of  the  East, 
but  I  do  remember  that  when  Alex- 
ander Kinglake  made  his  famous  visit 
to  the  East  he  began  his  story  with 
Belgrade.  "I  had  come,  as  it  were," 
so  he  says,  "to  the  end  of  this  wheel- 
going  Europe,  and  now  my  eyes  would 
see  the  splendor  and  havoc  of  the 
East."5  But  Belgrade  is  not  in  the 
East  for  us;  nay,  I  venture  to  go 
farther  and  say  that  Constantinople 
is  not  in  the  East.  Her  shining 
minarets,  most  beautiful  expression  of 
the  aspiration  of  Eastern  peoples,  nev- 
ertheless stand  upon  European  soil. 
They  are  in  the  Levant,  if  you  will,  but 
they  are  not  in  the  East.  Where,  then, 
do  you  ask,  does  the  East  begin;  and 
I  fear  the  answer  must  be  that  I  do 
not  know.  I  can  tell  you  quickly 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  11 

enough  that  Egypt  is  in  the  East; 
there  is  no  disputing  a  geographical 
and  ethnological  fact  so  patent,  and 
no  desire  to  dispute  it.  Phoenicia, 
Palestine,  Philistia — these  are  in  the 
East;  so  are  Babylonia  and  Assyria, 
Elam,  Media,  Persia;  these  all  are  in 
the  East.  But  when  you  seek  to  de- 
fine its  western  limits  one  can  only 
say  that  they  are  vague,  uncertain, 
disputable.  Somewhere  across  Asia 
Minor  runs  an  imaginary  line  that 
bounds  the  East.  It  is  not,  I  venture 
to  fancy,  along  its  western  seaboard, 
where  the  sea  is  a  deeper  blue  than 
anywhere  else  that  I  know,  save  only 
perhaps  (and  I  insist  on  the  perhaps) 
off  the  coast  of  Dalmatia.  No,  west- 
ern Asia  Minor  had  too  much  Western 
civilization,  too  deep  and  too  rich  a 
contact  with  the  Greeks,  to  be  quite 
Oriental  in  any  proper  sense.  Even 
Lydia  was  Western  at  the  same  time 
that  it  was  also  Eastern,  and  perhaps 
the  river  Halys,  where  Cyrus  halted 
his  columns,  may  serve  as  a  con- 
venient boundary  of  the  East  toward 
the  West. 

If  that  be  the  western  limit  of  the 
Orient  in  the  restricted  sense  which  I 


12  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

now  attach  to  the  word,what  is  its  east- 
ern limit?  It  does  not  include  China 
and  Japan,  with  their  island  territories, 
nor  vast  Siberia;  no,  nor  Turkestan, 
with  its  buried  memorials  of  forgotten 
civilizations.  I  should  say  that  where 
Persia's  dominions  touch  Turkestan, 
there  ends  the  Orient. 

From  Asia  Minor  to  Persia,  and  far 
southward  to  the  upper  cataracts  of 
the  Nile — most  interesting  river  in  the 
world — this  is  the  territory  which  I 
call  the  Orient,  my  Orient,  not  because 
of  any  special  property  right,  but  be- 
cause of  the  interest,  the  inspiration, 
the  delight  it  has  afforded  me  by  its 
many-colored  sights  and  scenes,  when 
I  have  wandered  over  its  plains  and 
mountains  and  deserts;  and  yet  more 
by  the  history  and  literature  which  it 
has  made  and  sent  over  land  and  sea 
even  unto  this  America,  distant  from 
it  both  in  space  and  time. 

What  a  glamour,  a  spell,  a  wizard 
touch  this  Orient  possesses  for  every 
cultivated  man!  In  its  gentler  as- 
pects beautiful  in  a  certain  over- 
powering brilliance,  bathed  in  a 
sunlight  too  intense  for  human  eyes 
during  much  of  the  year;  in  its  fiercer 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  13 

and  more  terrible  manifestations 
deadly  in  heat,  shimmering  in  great 
waves  over  trackless  deserts;  in  archi- 
tecture, massive,  solid,  enduring  the 
crash  of  ages,teaching  even  the  consum- 
mate skill  of  the  Greeks  the  beginnings 
of  constructive  engineering,  decorative 
beauty,  and  imposing  mass;  in  poetry, 
rising  from  passionate  lyrics  of  human 
love,  through  ballads  of  war  and  plaints 
of  pain,  even  into  agonized  searchings 
after  the  solution  of  the  problem  of 
suffering  and  of  the  mysteries  of  life 
after  death;  in  prose,  writing  little 
labels  for  wine  jars,3  making  simple 
records  of  purchase,  sale,  exchange/ 
lifting  up  panegyrics  over  battles 
fought  and  won,  boastings  of  kings 
and  conquerors,5  governors  and  des- 
pots, nay,  even  writing  laws6  by  which 
divers  peoples  were  ruled  in  justice, 
equity,  and  mercy;  in  music,  beating 
rude  drums,  screaming  in  wild  de- 
liriums, discovering  the  rhythms  of 
the  march  and  the  dance;  fashioning 
zithers  and  timbrels  and  searching  out 
one  medium  after  another  until  the 
harp  was  made,  whose  solemn  beating 
should  make  melody  more  and  more 
beautiful  over  all  the  Western  world 


14  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

even  to  that  green  island  in  the  dark 
Atlantic,  where  sounded  the  most 
famous  of  all  harps — 

The  harp  that  once  through  Tara's  halls 

The  soul  of  music  shed, 
Now  hangs  as  mute  on  Tara's  walls 

As  if  that  soul  were  fled.7 


Who  offers  apology  for  his  enthusiasm 
over  the  Orient,  modern  or  ancient? 
The  spell  of  thousands  of  years  is  with 
us  still;  nay,  is  stronger  than  ever, 
more  insistent,  more  filled  with  in- 
struction, with  power  to  quicken  emo- 
tion and  enkindle  life.  This  Orient 
lost  for  centuries  the  larger  part  of  its 
influence.  During  much  of  the  Middle 
Age  there  was  little  interest  in  any 
part  of  it  save  in  Palestine.  The 
Church,  indeed,  did  her  best8  to  keep 
alive  the  memory  of  the  historical 
writers,  the  poets,  the  wise  men,  the 
writers  of  letters  and  of  apocalypses  in 
her  sacred  books,  but  for  most  of  the 
Orient  forgetfulness  dominated  the 
minds  of  men. 

When  the  Renaissance  burst  upon 
Europe,  it  was,  first  of  all,  a  new  birth 
of  interest  and  enthusiasm  for  the 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  15 

overpowering  and  exhaustless  riches  of 
Greece  and  Rome  that  first  enthralled 
the  minds  of  men.  Petrarch,9  father 
of  humanism,  "first  effective  propa- 
gator of  humanism  in  the  world  at 
large/ '  in  his  letter  to  Homer  wrote, 
sadly,  "I  have  not  been  so  fortunate  as 
to  learn  Greek."  But  soon  afterward, 
when  the  Calabrian  Barlaam  came  to 
Italy,  Petrarch  became  his  pupil, 
though  in  a  little  while  compelled  to 
utter  the  plaint:  "I  had  thrown  my- 
self into  the  work  with  eager  hope  and 
keen  desire.  But  the  strangeness  of 
the  foreign  tongue,  and  the  early  de- 
parture of  my  teacher,  baffled  my 
purpose."  Wherein  he  failed,  Bo- 
caccio,10  under  his  inspiration,  meas- 
urably succeeded,  and  prepared  the 
way  for  Manuel  Chrysoloras,  first  real 
teacher  of  Greek  in  Italy,  beginner  of 
a  new  and  better  day.  As  this  tide  of 
learning  swept  over  the  Alps  it  was 
Erasmus11  who  conducted  it  into  wider 
channels.  When  his  apostolate  of 
knowledge  began  he  could  only  say 
that  among  his  good  Netherlander  a 
knowledge  of  Greek  was  "the  next 
thing  to  heresy,"  but  he  added,  "I 
did  my  best  to  deliver  the  rising 


16  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

generation  from  this  slough  of  igno- 
rance, and  to  inspire  them  with  a  taste 
for  better  studies. "  Interested  pro- 
foundly in  practical  morals,  inspired 
by  an  aggressive  religious  faith,  he 
edited  the  first  printed  Greek  Testa- 
ment, and  eagerly  urged  its  translation 
into  the  great  new  modern  languages 
with  which  Europe  was  then  covered. 
"I  long,"  he  said,  "that  the  husband- 
man should  sing  them  to  himself  as 
he  follows  the  plow,  that  the  weaver 
should  hum  them  to  the  tune  of  his 
shuttle,  that  the  traveler  should  be- 
guile with  them  the  weariness  of  his 
journey." 

When  the  Greek  Testament  began 
thus  to  pass  from  hand  to  hand  it  was 
inevitable  that  its  words  should  point 
backward,  as  well  as  forward,  and  its 
cry  sound  in  the  ears  of  men  to  open 
also  the  pages  of  the  Old  Testament 
and  "con  its  strident  and  panting 
vocables."12  The  beginnings  of  the 
study  of  Hebrew  in  western  Europe 
were  made  by  Johann  Reuchlin,13  who 
had  studied  Greek  at  Paris,  at  Basel, 
and  at  Rome,  only  to  turn  aside  from 
it  in  1492,  thenceforward  to  give  all 
his  life  to  Hebrew.  To  this  dear  old 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  17 

tongue  he  had  come  from  Greek, 
through  the  New  Testament,  and  also, 
strange  as  it  may  seem,  from  Neo- 
Platonism  backward  into  the  Cabbala. 
The  Church  was  willing  that  he  should 
study  the  Old  Testament  in  Hebrew, 
within  such  limitations  as  from  time 
to  time  might  be  deemed  necessary  by 
her  hierarchy,  but  she  was  speedily 
aroused  to  a  great  dread  of  the  Cab- 
bala and,  indeed,  of  all  other  forms  of 
Hebrew  learning.  In  1509  Johann 
Pfefferkorn — most  aromatic  of  names 
— a  converted  Jew,  sought  from  the 
Emperor  Maximilian  a  mandate  for 
the  suppression  of  all  Hebrew  books 
except  copies  of  the  Old  Testament. 
Reuchlin  opposed  this  stupid  narrow- 
ness, and  was  promptly  branded  as  a 
heretic  and  traitor  by  the  energetic 
Pfefferkorn.  Reuchlin  was  finally  tried 
before  an  ecclesiastical  court  at  Mainz, 
and  acquitted,  and  the  decision  was 
confirmed  by  the  Pope  in  1516.  It 
is  well  to  remember  that  not  all 
heresy  trials  issue  in  convictions.  But, 
lest  some  of^us  rejoice  overmuch,  it 
may  perhaps  be  well  to  admit  that, 
on  an  appeal  of  the  Dominicans,  Rome 
reversed  the  decision  in  1520.  Reuch- 


18  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

lin,  however,  paid  no  attention  to  the 
decree  against  him,  and  it  fell  into 
abeyance,  and  has  only  recently  come 
to  light  again.  He  is  the  true  father 
of  those  who  still  attempt  to  teach 
Hebrew  to  an  unwilling  world,  for  his 
book,  De  Rudimentis  Hebraicis,  a 
grammar  and  lexicon  combined,  based, 
indeed,  upon  Kimchi,  yet  original  in 
large  measure,  became  Europe's  first 
textbook  in  Oriental  languages. 
Reuchlin  was  more  than  a  patient, 
laborious  scholar;  he  was  an  inspiring 
teacher,  surrounded  speedily  wherever 
he  went  by  eager  pupils.  One  of  these 
was  a  grandson  of  his  own  sister, 
whose  uneuphonious  name,  Philip 
Schwartzerd,  he  turned  into  the  Greek 
form,  Philip  Melanchthon,  and  set 
the  precocious  boy  upon  the  delec- 
table road  of  learning.  In  the  making 
of  Germany's  great  teacher  and 
Luther's  friend  and  supporter  the 
world  may  all  too  readily  give  so  great 
glory  to  Reuchlin  as  to  forget  his 
just  fame  as  the  founder  of  Oriental 
studies  in  northern  Europe,  rival  even 
of  Erasmus  in  breadth  and  depth  of 
scholarship. 
With  Reuchlin  begins  the  recovery 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  19 

of  the  Ancient  Orient,  and  the  im- 
petus which  he  gave  lasts  to  this 
hour.  It  is  well  to  remind  ourselves 
that  the  wellspring  of  the  mighty 
stream  of  learning  that  encompasses 
and  overflows  the  whole  of  the  nearer 
East  took  its  rise  in  the  study  of  the 
Old  Testament,  and  it  may  be  added 
with  equal  justice  that  much  of  the 
later  enthusiasm  for  excavation  in 
Babylonia  and  Assyria  sprang  from  the 
same  source. 

And  now  I  must  sketch  such  picture 
as  I  may  of  the  scenes  of  bustle  and 
confusion  as  men  dug  up  forgotten 
cities,  and  laid  bare  to  astonished 
eyes  their  palaces  and  temples,  and 
of  the  less  important  scenes  set  in 
quiet  libraries  and  yet  more  quiet 
private  studies,  where  men  sat  through 
long  hours  of  day  and  night  patiently 
deciphering  unknown  tongues,  or  criti- 
cally examining  well-known  biblical 
books  to  search  out  their  origins  in 
ancient  documents.  My  enterprise  is 
difficult,  indeed,  for  it  is  nothing  less 
than 


Turning  the  accomplishment  of  many  years 
Into  an  hourglass,14 


20  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

as  Shakespeare  says,  and  I  must  seek 
to  do  it  not  with 

the  rattling  tongue 
Of  saucy  and  audacious  eloquence,15 

but  eager,  rather,  to  make  my  simple 
little  stream  both  shallow  and  deep 
like  the  river  described  by  Gregory 
the  Great,  " wherein  the  lamb  may 
find  a  footing  and  the  elephant  float 
at  large.7'18  The  proper  limits  of 
time  will  permit  me  to  tell  only  three 
stories  concerning  the  recovery  of  the 
Ancient  Orient,  to  paint  three  little 
pictures,  vignettes  of  patient  labor  and 
of  tireless  industry.  The  first  of  them 
has  its  place  in  the  great  valley  of  the 
Nile,  in  Egypt,  the  second  in  the  val- 
leys of  the  Rhine,  in  Germany,  and 
of  the  Thames  in  England,  and  the 
third  in  the  vast  and  lonely  valleys 
of  the  Euphrates  and  the  Tigris. 

Egypt  is  the  paradise  of  the  archae- 
ologist, for  her  incomparable  climate 
has  preserved  memorials  of  the  past, 
both  small  and  great,  which  must 
have  perished  if  less  favored  lands  had 
concealed  them.  Travelers  from  dear 
old  father  Herodotus  onward  trav- 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  21 

ersed  portions  of  her  valley,  and  car- 
ried away  memories  of  her  fertility 
and  sometimes  little  tokens  of  her 
artistic  handicrafts — a  scarab  or  a 
string  of  beads.  These  men  were  not 
archaeologists,  and  it  would  be  diffi- 
cult to  say  when  a  traveler  becomes  an 
antiquarian  or  an  archaeologist.  In 
1683,  however,  a  traveler  brought  to 
England  and  presented  to  the  Ash- 
molean  Museum,  Oxford,  a  valuable 
stele  from  the  ruins  of  Memphis, 
fashioned  in  the  period  of  the  Old 
Kingdom.  There  can  be  no  doubt 
that  he  was  an  archaeologist.  This 
little  piece  of  treasure  trove  was  the 
harbinger  of  the  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands of  objects  of  Egyptian  skill, 
inscribed  or  uninscribed,  which  now 
fill  the  museums  of  the  entire  civilized 
world. 

The  most  important  of  them  hardly 
began  to  be  made  accessible  until 
Napoleon  made  his  great  military 
expedition  into  Egypt  in  1798.  He 
was  bent,  indeed,  upon  a  scheme  of 
conquest  prodigious  in  conception,  but 
he  was  agitated  also  by  "the  desire  to 
wrest  the  secrets  of  learning  from  the 
mysterious  East/'  which  "seems  al- 


£2  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

ways  to  have  spurred  on  his  keenly 
inquisitive  nature.  "17  He  carried  with 
him  translations  of  Thucydides,  Plu- 
tarch, Tacitus,  and  Livy,  that  he 
might  inform  his  mind  concerning  the 
ancient  world;  and  the  authors  them- 
selves were  typical  of  the  knowledge 
of  antiquity  then  possessed  by  France. 
He  was,  indeed,  sailing  to  an  unknown 
shore,  but  his  ship  was  happily  named 
U  Orient,  and  upon  it  was  a  commis- 
sion of  savants  whose  business  it  was 
to  study  the  ancient  land  now  to  be 
conquered.  Their  labors  filled  the 
superb  volumes  of  the  Description  de 
I'Egypte,18  and  laid  the  foundations 
upon  which  future  generations  were 
to  build,  while  the  richest  treasure 
trove  was  the  Rosetta  stone,  inscribed 
with  three  versions — hieroglyphic,  de- 
motic, and  Greek — of  a  decree  of  the 
Egyptian  priests  in  honor  of  Ptolemy 
V19  (Epiphanes,  B.  C.  205-182),  and 
his  wife,  Cleopatra.  At  the  capitula- 
tion of  Alexandria,  in  1801,  this  ob- 
ject was  ceded  to  the  British  govern- 
ment, and  by  regular  stages  passed  to 
the  British  Museum.20  It  was  an 
Englishman,  Thomas  Young,  a  cele- 
brated physicist,  who  first  essayed,  by 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  23 

its  use,  to  decipher  Egyptian.  Im- 
portant as  his  efforts  were,  they  were 
soon  surpassed  by  the  brilliant  French 
linguist,  J.  F.  Champollion,21  who,  in 
1818,  was  able  to  transcribe  the  de- 
motic names  of  Ptolemy  and  Cleo- 
patra into  hieroglyphics,  and  within 
four  years  had  identified  the  name 
of  Alexander  in  a  cartouche,  and  se- 
cured no  less  than  fourteen  alphabetic 
signs.  With  these  he  attacked  some 
drawings  which  had  been  brought 
from  Egypt  and  read  the  names 
Rameses  and  Thotmes,  thus  proving 
beyond  reasonable  dispute  that  his 
researches  had  really  taken  the  inner 
citadel  of  the  language.  The  kings  of 
Egypt  would  now  live  again,  for 
speech  was  restored  to  their  silent 
records.  From  that  wonderful  day, 
the  fourteenth  of  September,  1822, 
the  progress  of  decipherment  was 
steady.  Richard  Lepsius  in  Germany, 
Samuel  Birch  in  England,  and  Eman- 
uel  de  Rouge  in  France  took  up  the 
great  task,  and  their  successors  down 
to  Adolf  Erman,  of  Berlin,  in  our 
own  day,  have  made  for  us  dictionaries 
and  grammars  until  we  proceed  with 
some  of  the  sureness  with  which  the 


24  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

interpreter  of  Greek  and  Latin  in- 
scriptions labors,  though  even  yet  we 
can  hardly  claim  to  read  Egyptian  as 
we  read  the  classical  authors. 

Contemporaneously  with  the  proc- 
esses of  decipherment  has  gone  the 
assembling  of  materials  to  be  read. 
In  the  years  1842-1845  Richard  Lep- 
sius,  under  the  patronage  of  the  Prus- 
sian government,  explored  Egypt  and 
Nubia  as  far  as  Khartum,  and  brought 
back  copies  and  squeezes  of  hundreds 
of  inscriptions  which  were  soon  to  be 
read.22  After  him  Mariette  became 
director  of  the  "Service  of  Antiquities/7 
and  began  the  collection  of  archae- 
ological objects,  and  the  preservation 
of  such  as  could  not  be  moved  from 
their  sites.  A  museum  of  Egyptian 
antiquities  founded  first  at  Bulak,  and 
thence  removed  to  a  deserted  palace 
at  Gizeh,  is  now  splendidly  housed  in 
a  great  building  at  Kasr-en-Nil,  and 
under  the  wise  administration  of  Mas- 
pero  has  risen  to  preeminent  rank 
among  all  its  competitors,  housing  col- 
lections which  are  the  wonder  and 
admiration  of  every  cultivated  man 
whose  joy  it  is  to  see  them.  From  the 
unsurpassed  riches  of  Egypt  many 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  25 

other  museums  in  Berlin,  Paris,  and 
London  have  been  filled  with  objects 
of  surpassing  beauty  or  of  skillful 
adaptation  to  varied  practical  uses. 
A  few  universities — sadly  few — have 
established  professorships  of  Egyptol- 
ogy, and  patient  scholars  have  re- 
stored to  our  thought  the  hopes  and 
aspirations,  as  well  as  the  achieve- 
ments, of  the  gifted  people  who  lived 
in  the  valley  of  the  Nile. 

There  is  no  more  romantic  story  in 
the  brilliant  annals  of  the  progress  of 
human  knowledge  than  this  story 
which  I  have  thus  inadequately  por- 
trayed. It  began  with  the  conquests 
of  the  greatest  military  genius  the 
world  has  ever  known.  The  physical 
power  which  he  wielded  over  Egypt 
has  passed  to  other  hands,  but  this 
great  contribution  to  human  knowl- 
edge has  survived  the  wreck  of  all  his 
fortunes.  Well  may  we  remember 
Bonaparte's  noble  words  to  the  magis- 
trates of  the  Ligurian  Republic:  "The 
true  conquests,  the  only  conquests 
which  cost  no  regrets,  are  those 
achieved  over  ignorance/723 

I  have  said  enough,  within  the  limi- 
tations which  are  now  properly  upon 


26  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

me,  of  Egypt.  I  turn  to  the  recovery 
of  Israel,  and  especially  to  the  recov- 
ery from  her  wonderful  literature  of 
the  true  story  of  her  history,  and  a 
more  fruitful  interpretation  of  her 
heritage  to  all  the  ages. 

We  have  seen  that  Johann  Reuchlin 
in  the  period  of  the  Renaissance  be- 
came the  founder  of  a  new  school  of 
Hebrew  and  Oriental  study.  Over  the 
names  of  hundreds  of  his  successors  I 
must  pass  without  a  word  of  comment, 
as  I  search  for  that  which  is  imme- 
diately significant,  and  at  the  same 
time  of  wide-reaching  importance. 
Many  of  these  made  contributions  to 
our  knowledge  of  Israel's  literature, 
or  history,  or  antiquities;  some  of 
them  were  men  of  daring  invention 
and  of  great  power;  some  failed  to 
set  out  upon  new  lines  only  because 
the  time  was  not  yet  come.  But 
whatever  the  cause,  centuries  passed 
and  the  Old  Testament  continued  to 
be  studied  with  much  the  same  tools 
and  with  much  the  same  result.  But 
now  behold  the  beginnings  of  a  new 
epoch,  the  discovery  of  new  methods 
of  research,  the  reconstruction  of  our 
view  of  Israel's  history  and  literature. 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  27 

To  see  this  we  must  turn  our  eyes 
from  the  broad  Nile  to  the  narrow 
stream  of  a  simple  pastoral  river  in 
Germany,  the  river  Leine.  There  in 
the  city  of  Gottingen  lived  from  1803 
to  1874,  save  only  for  the  sad  years  of 
exile,  1837-1848,  Georg  Heinrich  Au- 
gust Ewald  as  a  student  and  as  a 
professor.  There  he  began  his  career 
as  an  investigator  by  the  study  of  the 
meters  of  Arabic  poetry,  but  passed 
speedily  over  to  Hebrew,  writing  a 
grammar  in  which  he  laid  the  foun- 
dations of  the  historico-comparative 
method  in  Semitic  philology.  With 
this  sound  grammatical  foundation  he 
moved  over  into  more  distinctively 
literary  study,  and  in  1840-1841  ap- 
peared his  great  work  on  the  prophets 
(Die  Propheteri),  the  second  edition  of 
which  was  published  so  recently  as 
1867.  In  1859  he  finished  his  History 
of  the  People  of  Israel.  Into  that  one 
supreme  effort  the  greatest  Orientalist 
of  his  day,  the  greatest  living  Hebrew 
grammarian,  had  poured  the  whole 
fruitage  of  his  life.  Well  might  Dean 
Stanley  declare  that  it  was  "as  power- 
ful in  its  general  conception  as  it  is 
saturated  with  learning  down  to  its 


28  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

minutest  details."  The  book  was,  in- 
deed, based  upon  a  defective  criticism 
of  its  sources,  but  it  rested  upon 
sound  and  often  brilliant  exegesis. 

While  Ewald  was  busy  at  Gottingen, 
the  University  of  Halle  had  a  dis- 
tinguished Old  Testament  expert  in 
Hermann  Hupfeld,  who  in  1853  pub- 
lished a  great  work,  The  Sources  of 
Genesis  and  the  Mode  of  their  Combi- 
nation Investigated  Anew.  It  would  be 
difficult  to  exaggerate  the  influence 
of  that  book.  By  the  labors  of  his 
predecessors  the  world  of  learning  was 
beginning  to  be  familiar  with  the 
Jehovist,  the  Elohist,  and  the  Deu- 
teronomist,  who  were  believed  to 
have  written  the  original  documents 
from  which  the  Pentateuch  was  com- 
posed. But  the  explanation  of  the 
manner  in  which  they  were  united 
to  form  the  present  book  of  Genesis 
was  a  subject  of  much  dispute.  The 
two  regnant  theories  had  been  known 
as  the  fragmentary  and  the  supple- 
mentary. Ewald  had  smitten  the 
former  theory  with  all  his  tremendous 
learning  and  energy,  and  it  displayed 
few  signs  of  life  afterward.  And  now 
Hupfeld,  having  rediscovered  in  Gen- 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  29 

esis  a  source  then  called  the  second 
Elohist,  which  Ilgen  had  previously 
found,  proceeded  to  show  that  each 
of  these  three  sources  in  Genesis  was 
formerly  a  separate  work.  That  dem- 
onstration made  an  end  of  the  supple- 
mentary theory  and  the  ground  was 
cleared  for  a  larger  generalization,  for 
a  newer  and  better  theory  which  Hup- 
feld  was  not  able  to  produce.  He  had 
done  his  work  in  a  fine  spirit.  His  faith 
in  the  supernatural  was  deep  and 
strong,  for  the  older  rationalism  to 
which  he  was  born  he  had  left  far 
behind,  yet  he  did  not  escape  perse- 
cution. In  1865  he  was  reported  to 
the  Prussian  government  as  "an  ir- 
reverent critic  of  the  divine  revela- 
tion"; but  it  is  pleasant  to  remember 
that  the  entire  theological  faculty  at 
Halle  supported  him,  including  the 
saintly  Tholuck.  In  the  very  next 
year  he  passed  to  his  reward. 

And  now  my  story  approaches  its 
climax.  While  Hupfeld  was  lecturing 
and  writing  at  Halle,  in  the  simple 
little  valley  of  the  Saale,  Edward 
Reuss  was  professor  of  Old  Testament 
Theology  at  Strassburg,  then  a  city  of 
France,  in  the  noble  valley  of  the 


30  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

Rhine,  fairest  river  of  Europe.  Reuss 
had  thought  long  and  diligently  upon 
the  Old  Testament  and  had  arrived 
at  conclusions  so  different  from  all 
that  his  predecessors  had  announced 
that  he  dared  not  publish  them.  But 
he  set  them  forth  to  his  students  from 
time  to  time,  and  in  that  wonderful 
lecture  room  they  were  heard  by  two 
young  men,  Karl  Heihrich  Graf  and 
August  Kayser,  who  gave  to  them  a 
publicity  which  their  author  had  not 
dared.  The  conclusion  that  Reuss 
planted  in  his  students'  minds  came  to 
him,  so  he  said,  almost  as  an  intuition. 
It  was  startling  enough,  surely,  though 
he  stated  it  in  simple  words:  "The 
prophets  are  earlier  than  the  law, 
and  the  Psalms  are  later  than  both."24 
In  1865  Graf  published  a  book  en- 
titled The  Historical  Books  of  the  Old 
Testament:  Two  historico-critical  Inves- 
tigations. That  book  has  revolution- 
ized the  discussions  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment, partly  because  the  way  before 
it  had  been  admirably  prepared  by 
the  work  of  John  William  Colenso, 
Anglican  Bishop  of  Natal,  the  first 
volume  of  whose  great  book  on  the 
Pentateuch  and  Joshua,  Critically  Ex- 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  31 

amined,  had  appeared  in  1862,  with 
a  second  edition  following  in  the  next 
year.  This  book  made  clear  to  many 
minds  that  the  old  views  of  the  Mo- 
saic authorship  of  the  Pentateuch  and 
its  unassailable  historical  accuracy  in 
small  as  well  as  in  great  were  alike 
untenable.25  For  this  service  to  learn- 
ing he  was  quite  naturally  accused  of 
heresy,  tried,  convicted  and  formally 
deposed  by  the  Bishop  of  Cape  Town, 
but  on  an  appeal  to  the  Privy  Council 
was  restored,  and,  having  labored  long 
and  successfully  for  the  spiritual  eman- 
cipation of  the  Zulus,  and  not  less 
successfully  in  biblical  criticism,  he 
died  (in  1883)  upon  his  mission  field, 
leaving  an  imperishable  name. 

Neither  Graf  nor  Colenso  could  have 
successfully  carried  this  great  cause 
but  for  the  exposition,  extension,  and 
defense  of  their  theses  by  two  men  so 
extraordinary  in  learning,  in  insight, 
and  in  power  of  generalization  as 
Abraham  Kuenen  and  Julius  Well- 
hausen.  These  two  men  made  the 
new  era. 

In  1869  there  appeared  in  Leiden 
Kuenen's  Religion  of  Israel  (Godsdienst 
van  Israel) ,  which  came  to  a  second  edi- 


32  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

tion  in  1887.  Accused  of  a  dangerous 
naturalism,  though  his  attitude  was 
rather  psychological,  Kuenen's  contri- 
bution to  a  proper  appraisement  of  Is- 
rael's religion,  when  compared  with  that 
of  her  neighbors,  made  a  new  road  into 
the  heart  of  antiquity.  Meanwhile,  be- 
tween these  two  editions  of  Kuenen's 
monumental  work,  in  the  year  1876 
there  had  begun  a  series  of  papers  by 
Julius  Wellhausen  on  the  Composition 
of  the  Hexateuch,  published  together  in 
1885  and  in  an  enlarged  form  in  1889. 
Then  in  1878  Wellhausen  published 
his  Prolegomena  zur  Geschichte  Israels, 
a  second  edition  of  which  was  issued 
in  1883.  In  these  books  the  develop- 
ment hypothesis  of  Vatke  was  coura- 
geously applied  to  the  whole  Old 
Testament  history;  the  documents 
were  analyzed  with  a  thoroughness 
never  attempted  before,  while  every 
feature  of  the  religious  life  and  cere- 
monial was  studied  in  its  several 
relations  to  the  history.  There  is 
nothing  that  I  can  say  which  could 
possibly  exaggerate  the  importance  of 
these  works  of  Kuenen  and  Well- 
hausen. Whether  you  agree  with 
them  or  not,  in  whole  or  in  part, 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  33 

matters  little  indeed,  but  to  g<T~on 
with  Old  Testament  research  without 
taking  heed  to  them  is  absolutely  im- 
possible. They  have  filled  the  whole 
world  with  a  new  discussion.  No 
commentary  can  be  opened  without 
finding  some  allusion,  direct  or  in- 
direct, to  the  position  which  they  set 
forth  and  defended.  Their  fundamen- 
tal thesis  is  simple  enough.  They 
accepted  the  results  which  their  pre- 
decessors had  achieved  in  separating 
the  first  six  books  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment into  four  great  original  docu- 
ments known  as  the  Jehovistic  or 
Judaistic,  the  Elohistic  or  Ephraimis- 
tic,  the  Deuteronomist,  and  the  Priest- 
Code,  and  they  sought  to  prove  that 
they  had  been  produced  in  the  order 
J.,  E.,  D.,  P.,  and  that  the  last,  the 
Priest-Code,  was  composed  during  the 
Babylonian  exile.  The  view  of  Is- 
rael's history  which  this  rearrangement 
of  the  sources  compels  is  indeed  far 
different  from  that  which  the  priests 
of  Jerusalem  had  taken  when  the 
Books  of  Chronicles  were  written,  and 
it  is  small  wonder  that  it  awakened 
doubt  in  many  quarters,  stern  oppo- 
sition in  others,  and  heated  repudia- 


34  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

tion  in  still  others.  That  it  has  made 
enormous  and  astounding  headway 
against  all  opposition  none  can  deny. 
It  has  found  acceptance  of  its  main 
conclusions  nearly  all  over  the  world, 
and  the  opposition  to  it  is  now  more 
an  opposition  to  details,  such  as  to 
the  date  which  it  assigns  to  certain 
documents,  than  to  its  fundamental 
contentions.  There  still  remains,  in- 
deed, a  respectable  body  of  scholars, 
adherents  of  the  new  astral  theories 
of  Babylonian  religion,  who  find  more 
fundamental  objections.  Whether  it 
will  overcome  all  opposition  remains  to 
be  seen,  and  I  shall  not  venture  upon 
specific  prediction;  but  it  may  be  re- 
garded as  certain,  I  think,  that  its 
mark  upon  the  study  of  the  Old  Tes- 
tament is  permanent.  No  matter 
how  much  the  theory  may  be  changed 
by  later  research,  we  shall  never  again 
go  back  to  the  view  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment which  it  displaced.  Perhaps  I 
ought  also  to  say  that  the  Old  Testa- 
ment, in  its  real  significance,  in  its 
own  very  self,  has  not  suffered  one 
whit  in  the  process.  It  is  better  and 
truer  and  richer  than  ever.  The 
theories  which  have  been  built  about 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  35 

it  and  over  its  essential  truths  have 
indeed  suffered,  and  may  suffer  more. 
Your  ideas  and  mine  have  suffered  or 
experienced  change — a  process  most 
wholesome,  and  proof  of  our  life,  for 
life  is  change.  Theology  by  the 
achievement  and  by  the  acceptance  of 
these  new  results  has  proved  itself 
worthy  of  holding  its  place  with  all 
the  great  sciences  which  have  broad- 
ened man's  view  of  the  world,  cleared 
his  cities  of  desolating  pestilences,  and 
helped  his  creatures  to  a  better  life. 
The  real  message  of  the  Old  Testament 
is  in  no  more  danger  from  the  ex- 
plorations of  the  most  rigid  and  search- 
ing criticism  than  is  God's  universe 
from  the  investigations  of  astronomy 
or  geology.  Old  Testament  Criticism 
has  had  its  share  in  the  recovery  of 
the  Ancient  Orient.26 

I  must  now  turn  to  my  third  story, 
the  story  of  the  recovery  of  Baby- 
lonia and  Assyria.  In  romance  it  is 
not  behind  the  story  of  Egypt's  re- 
covery; in  surprises  it  far  surpasses  itj 
in  the  extent  of  its  results  and  in  the 
wide  extent  of  their  influence  it  excels 
it  much.  No  such  rich  plunder  of 
written  documents  in  inscription  and 


36  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

tablet  and  monument  ever  before 
came  out  of  the  earth.  I  must  speak 
of  it  with  some  restraint,  lest  my  en- 
thusiasm put  you  too  much  upon 
your  guard  and  prevent  even  the 
proper  acceptance  of  my  story. 

In  the  year  B.  C.  607  or  606  the 
city  of  Nineveh  was  destroyed  and 
deserted,  the  walls  of  its  palaces  top- 
pled in,  and  the  unburned  bricks  of 
which  they  were  partly  composed  dis- 
solved into  formless  masses  under  the 
rains,  while  the  sands  of  the  desert 
drifted  over  them  and  turned  them 
into  big  mounds.  The  very  site  of 
the  city  was  forgotten  so  completely 
that  a  cultivated  Greek  led  his  re- 
treating ten  thousand  by  the  mounds 
and  never  knew  that  beneath  them 
lay  the  remains  of  antiquity's  most 
powerful  city.  In  similar  fashion 
Babylon,  with  all  its  splendor,  was  re- 
duced to  heaps  and  mounds,  standing 
in  solemn  silence  by  the  slow-flowing 
course  of  the  Euphrates.  From  these 
mounds  must  be  excavated  the  records 
of  their  civilization  and  these  be  de- 
ciphered before  we  should  be  able  to 
recover  a  picture  of  their  life,  an 
appreciation  of  their  culture,  or  a 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  37 

knowledge   of   their   contributions   to 
civilization. 

It  fell  to  the  lot  of  an  Englishman 
to  begin  that  great  work  of  excavation 
which  was  to  restore  to  modern  knowl- 
edge the  ancient  civilization  of  Baby- 
lonia and  Assyria.  It  was  on  Decem- 
ber 10,  1811,  that  Claudius  James 
Rich  saw  for  the  first  time  the  great 
mounds  that  marked  ancient  Baby- 
lon's grave.  Here  is  what  he  had  to 
say  of  his  first  impressions:  "From 
the  accounts  of  modern  travelers  I 
had  expected  to  find  on  the  site  of 
Babylon  more,  and  less,  than  I  ac- 
tually did.  Less,  because  I  could  have 
formed  no  conception  of  the  pro- 
digious extent  of  the  whole  ruins,  or 
of  the  size,  solidity,  and  perfect  state 
of  some  of  the  particular  parts  of  them; 
and  more,  because  I  thought  that  I 
should  have  distinguished  some  traces, 
however  imperfect,  of  many  of  the 
principal  structures  of  Babylon.  I 
imagined  I  should  have  said:  'Here 
were  the  walls,  and  such  must  have 
been  the  extent  of  the  area.  There 
stood  the  palace,  and  this  most  as- 
suredly was  the  tower  of  Belus.'  I 
was  completely  deceived;  instead  of  a 


38  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

few  insulated  mounds,  I  found  the 
whole  face  of  the  country  covered  with 
the  vestiges  of  building;  in  some  places 
consisting  of  brick  walls  surprisingly 
fresh,  in  others  merely  of  a  vast  suc- 
cession of  mounds  of  rubbish  of  such 
indeterminate  figures,  variety,  and 
extent  as  to  involve  the  person 
who  should  have  formed  any  the- 
ory in  inextricable  confusion  and 
contradiction/727 

He  did  not  attempt  excavations,  but 
secured  from  the  natives  tablets  writ- 
ten in  the  cuneiform  character,  which 
neither  he  nor  indeed  anyone  could 
read,  but  which  were  later  to  become 
intelligible  to  men.  Nine  years  later 
he  entered  the  city  of  Mosul,  on  the 
banks  of  the  Tigris,  and  spent  four 
months  in  sketching  and  planning  the 
great  mounds  which  he  considered 
formed  the  remains  of  the  city  of 
Nineveh.  The  beginning  was  made, 
but  it  was  long  before  actual  excava- 
tions were  begun,  and  the  honor  of 
undertaking  them  fell  to  France  and 
not  to  England. 

On  May  25,  1842— a  fateful  day  in 
the  history  of  Assyriological  research 
— Paul  Emil  Botta  entered  upon  his 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  39 

duties  as  vice-consul  of  France  at 
Mosul.  Soon  afterward  he  began  ex- 
cavations upon  one  of  the  great 
mounds  of  Nineveh,  but  met  with 
only  very  moderate  success.  He  then 
dispatched  some  of  his  workmen  to  try 
the  mound  of  Khorsabad,  fourteen 
miles  away.  \  The  resolve  was  fortunate, 
and  in  three  days  word  was  brought  to 
him  at  Mosul  that  antiquities  and  in- 
scriptions had  already  been  found.  He 
went  to  the  scene  and  there  beheld  a 
sight  which  thrilled  him.  Before  his 
astonished  eyes  was  an  excavation 
which  had  laid  bare  the  marble  floor 
of  one  part  of  some  great  room  and 
on  its  surface  lay  fragments  of  marble 
sculptures,  calcined  by  fire,  and  num- 
bers of  well-preserved  inscriptions.  He 
knew  that  the  discovery  was  impor- 
tant, but  he  did  not  know  that  he  had 
lighted  upon  the  remains  of  a  vast  and 
imposing  palace  erected  by  one  of  the 
greatest  kings  who  had  ever  ruled  in 
Assyria,  Sargon  II  (B.  C.  721-705), 
conqueror  of  Samaria,  destroyer  of  the 
northern  kingdom  of  Israel.  Cheered 
by  this,  Botta  pushed  on  with  dogged 
persistence  until  he  had  laid  bare 
much  of  the  palace,  and  drawn  from 


40  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

their  concealment  scores  of  inscrip- 
tions, chiefly  upon  stone,  and  monu- 
mental in  character.  The  results  far 
exceeded  his  fondest  dreams,  and  the 
materials  thus  retrieved  and  sent  off 
to  Paris  laid  the  foundations  of  one  of 
the  great  Assyrian  collections  of  the 
world,  in  the  museum  of  the  Louvre. 
In  1845  Austin  Henry  Layard,  an 
Englishman,  followed  Botta  and  suc- 
ceeded on  the  mounds  at  Nineveh 
where  Botta  had  been  least  fortunate. 
He  and  his  disciple,  Hormuzd  Rassam, 
uncovered  the  buried  library  of  Ashur- 
banipal  (B.  C.  668-625),  last  of  the 
great  Assyrian  kings,  and  poured  into 
the  British  Museum  a  flood  of  thou- 
sands of  clay  books,  in  which  were  to 
be  found  examples  of  almost  every 
phase  of  literature  known  to  the  an- 
cient world. 

This  was  but  the  beginning  of  exca- 
vations. Others  followed  in  quick 
succession,  and  France,  England, 
America,  and  Germany  vied  with  each 
other  in  an  honorable  search  for  the 
memorials  of  an  ancient  civilization. 
It  was  the  French  who  were  first 
(1852)  in  the  field  with  brilliantly  suc- 
cessful excavations  at  Khorsabad  and 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  41 

at  the  site  of  ancient  Babylon,  whose 
results  were,  unfortunately,  lost  by 
the  overturning  of  the  raft  in  the 
Tigris,  though  happily  not  until  they 
had  been  critically  examined  and  par- 
tially copied  by  Jules  Oppert — clarum 
et  venerabile  nomen — who  thus  early 
gave  promise  of  the  distinguished  ca- 
reer which  was  to  come.  Long  after 
(1877-1881)  the  French  were  again 
successful  in  the  person  of  M.  Ernest 
de  Sarzec,  who  brought  out  of  one 
mound  in  southern  Babylonia  the  re- 
mains of  a  fine  temple  whose  outer 
walls  were  one  hundred  and  seventy- 
five  feet  long  and  one  hundred  feet 
broad,  and  from  whose  inner  cells  and 
rooms  came  statues  and  inscriptions 
fashioned  by  the  great  Sumerian  peo- 
ple, whose  culture  had  preceded  the 
Semitic  in  the  great  valley. 

Between  these  last  two  expeditions 
the  English  people  were  well  repre- 
sented in  explorations  by  William 
Kennet  Loftus,  J.  E.  Taylor,  who  first 
struck  a  spade  into  the  mound  cover- 
ing Ur  of  the  Chaldees,  and  by  George 
Smith,  who,  doubly  famous  in  de- 
cipherment and  in  excavation,  finally 
laid  down  his  life  at  Aleppo  (August 


42  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

19,   1876),  faithful  in  the  pursuit  of 
knowledge  to  the  last. 

Incited  by  the  example  of  the  older 
peoples,  America  joined  the  company 
in  1889,  and  John  P.  Peters,  J.  H. 
Haynes,  and  H.  V.  Hilprecht  laid  bare 
a  large  part  of  the  ancient  city  of 
Nippur,28  at  whose  famous  temple  men 
had  worshiped  when  written  history 
was  still  in  its  youth.  As  these  all  had 
done  their  share,  it  was  fitting  that 
the  youngest  of  the  great  empires, 
Germany,  should  also  manifest  her 
interest.  Even  while  I  speak,  at  As- 
shur,  oldest  city  of  the  Assyrian  world 
empire,  and  at  Babylon,  seat  of  the 
most  ancient  culture,  the  Germans  are 
at  work  with  the  same  devotion  to  a 
precision  in  things  small  and  great 
which  has  given  them  the  world's 
leadership  in  science.29 

Here  now  were  the  stores  of  written 
records,  and  they  were  just  as  silent  as 
though  buried,  until  the  key  to  set 
free  their  speech  was  found.  This  was 
a  task  requiring  patience,  persist- 
ence, and  a  certain  almost  uncanny 
genius  in  the  "showing  of  dark  sen- 
tences and  dissolving  of  doubts." 
Let  me  show  in  a  few  sentences 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  43 

only  what  these  qualities  brought  to 
fruition. 

In  1765  Carsten  Niebuhr  brought 
from  the  table  land  of  Persia,  where 
once  had  stood  the  city  of  Persepolis, 
made  beautiful  and  imposing  by 
Darius  the  Great  (B.  C.  521-485),  a 
series  of  trilingual  inscriptions  all 
written  in  the  wedge-shaped  or  cunei- 
form characters,  but  each  somewhat 
different  in  form.  In  1802  George 
Friedrich  Grotefend,  a  master  in  the 
Gymnasium  at  Frankf ort-on-the-Main, 
set  himself  definitely  to  the  apparently 
hopeless  task  of  comparing  three  un- 
known languages  in  order  to  the  solu- 
tion of  one,  and  its  reading.  &  The 
first  of  each  group  of  these  was  an- 
cient Persian,  and  by  the  archaeologi- 
cal method  of  comparison  Grotefend 
picked  out  the  signs  which  spelled  the 
great  names  Darius,  Xerxes,  and  Cyrus 
— and  the  key  was  found!  Even  while 
he  was  thus  patiently  at  work,  Sir 
Henry  Rawlinson,  in  far-away  Persia, 
was  climbing  the  perilous  rocks  at 
Behistun  to  copy  a  large  inscription  of 
Darius,  also  in  three  languages,  which 
he  forthwith  began  to  decipher,  using 
precisely  the  same  method  as  Grote- 


44  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

fend.  It  was  these  two  men,  partly 
independently  and  partly  by  mutual 
assistance,  who  gave  men  the  ability 
once  more  to  read  Persian.  The  sec- 
ond language  in  each  group  was  Su- 
sian,  and  the  third  Babylonian.  The 
last  yielded  first  to  the  decipherment, 
and  the  glory  of  it  fell  to  Edward 
Hincks,  a  country  clergyman  in  a  tiny 
fishing  village  in  Ireland.  To  him  also 
and  to  Jules  Oppert  in  Paris  was  it 
given  to  lay  the  foundations  of  Assy- 
rian grammar,  which  were  later  to 
find  full  exposition  at  the  skillful  hand 
of  Friedrich  Delitzsch,30  general  di- 
rector of  the  German  excavations  of 
which  I  was  speaking  but  a  few 
minutes  ago,  and  founder  of  a  school 
of  Assyriologists,  whose  labors  abound 
and  to  whom  belongs  in  large  measure 
the  present  leadership  of  the  science. 
Excavation  had  produced  the  material 
and  decipherment  had  made  its  read- 
ing possible.31 

Almost  in  the  very  beginnings  of 
the  newborn  science  of  Assyriology 
points  of  contact  with  Israel  devel- 
oped. George  Smith,  at  work  in  the 
British  Museum,  found  upon  Assyrian 
tablets  the  names  of  Hebrew  kings, 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  45 

and  in  a  short  time  followed  that  up 
by  finding  the  Babylonian  story  of  the 
flood,  which  bore  such  marked  resem- 
blance to  the  narrative  in  Genesis  that 
none  could  doubt  that  some  relation- 
ship existed  between  them.  There 
began  a  discussion  which  continues 
with  almost  unabated  intensity  and 
interest  until  this  present  moment. 

Soon  thereafter  the  early  decipherers 
produced  out  of  the  mass  of  Assyrian 
documents  inscriptions  of  Shalmaneser 
III,  king  of  Assyria,  an  account  of  one 
of  his  campaigns  into  the  West,  in 
which  he  claimed  a  great  victory  over 
Bir-idri  (Ben-Hadad)  of  Damascus, 
with  his  allies,  and  names  as  one  of 
them  Ahab,  king  of  Israel.32  That  one 
discovery  related  the  history  of  Israel 
to  the  wider  history  of  the  ancient 
Oriental  world,  and  gave  men  their 
first  real  opportunity  to  grasp  its  sig- 
nificance as  a  history  among  histories. 
And  when,  a  little  later,  religious  texts 
from  Babylonian  mounds  began  to 
appear,  it  slowly  dawned  upon  the 
minds  of  thinking  men  that  the  re- 
ligion of  Israel  was  likewise  a  religion 
among  religions,  and  that  the  problem 
of  its  investigation  had  become  enor- 


46  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

mously  complicated,  at  the  same  time 
that  it  became  far  more  interesting.38 

While  these  investigations  were  in 
progress  the  tide  of  exploration  rose 
higher.  New  Assyrian  collections  were 
formed  in  Berlin  and  in  Philadelphia, 
and  their  assembled  objects  mounted 
into  the  tens  of  thousands,  while 
scores  of  smaller  collections  were  scat- 
tered over  the  world  from  Upsala  in 
Sweden  to  Buenos  Aires  in  Argentina. 
Assyriology  was  divided  into  special- 
ties. One  man  gave  most  of  his  time 
to  grammar,  another  to  lexicography; 
one  to  historical,  another  to  religious 
texts.  The  language  of  Nineveh  and 
of  Babylon  disclosed  relationships  with 
Arabic  on  the  one  side  and  with  He- 
brew on  the  other.  The  comparative 
grammar  of  the  Semitic  languages 
began  to  be  written.  Comparative  re- 
ligion was  almost  overwhelmed  with 
facts  demanding  a  new  synthesis.  The 
ancient  Oriental  world  was  recovered 
in  so  far  that  it  was  now  possible  to 
view  its  details  of  life  and  thought  in 
the  light  of  its  whole  history,  political, 
social,  and  economic. 

My  story  is  told;  my  little  pictures 
are  drawn.  Suffer  me  but  a  moment 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  47 

while  I  make  a  bold  claim.  I  have 
spoken  of  the  recovery  of  Egypt,  of 
Israel,  of  Babylonia.  These  are  but 
typical  instances.  I  have  said  naught 
of  Phoenicia,  of  the  Hittites,  of  Persia, 
of  Chaldea,  of  Armenia.  I  am  bold 
to  say  that  in  the  realm  of  history  and 
of  letters,  these  are  the  most  remark- 
able achievements  of  the  human  mind 
during  the  last  century.  Even  though 
they  have  brought  to  us  no  art,  and  no 
letters  equal  to  those  of  Greece  or  of 
Rome,  they  have  set  in  new  and  clearer 
relationships  the  classical  literature  of 
religion,  which  is  Hebrew,  and  this 
is  not  less  precious  to  us  than  the 
best  that 

Athens,  the  eye  of  Greece,  mother  of  arts 
And  eloquence,34 

has  bequeathed  to  us.  Our  minds 
have  been  broadened  by  the  process, 
we  see  further  into  the  mysteries  of 
human  life;  we  are  richer  than  our 
fathers;  and  glorious  as  all  this  is, 
before  us  lies  the  promise  of  yet  more 
fruitful  days,  for  the  end  of  the  re- 
covery of  the  Ancient  Orient  is  not 
with  us,  but  with  the  generations  still 
unborn. 


NOTES 

I  HAVE  ventured  to  write  these  notes  in 
explanation  of  matters  that  could  not  be 
covered  in  an  hour's  address,  hoping  that 
some  might  find  an  empty  hour  for  their 
perusal,  and  count  it  not  ill  spent  if  aught  of 
interest  or  of  value  be  secured,  or  perhaps  a 
misunderstanding  prevented,  or,  better  than 
either,  a  door  to  larger  learning  be  opened. 
They  are  not  very  numerous,  nor  very  lengthy, 
remembering  the  wisdom  of  Willibald  Alexis: 
"Viele  Antworten  und  Wegweiser  sind  schlim- 
mer  als  keine." 

1  The  society  was  organized  at  the  ancient 
college  of  William  and  Mary,  Williamsburg, 
Virginia,  December  5,  1776,  by  five  students 
— John    Heath,     Richard    Booker,     Thomas 
Smith,  Armistead  Smith,  and  John  Jones.     It 
was  then  little  more  than  a  social  club,  but 
rose  to  serve  a  higher  cause  in  days  of  greater 
national  prosperity. 

2  Alexander   William   Kinglake,   Eothen,   or 
Traces    of    Travel,    brought     home     from     the 
East  (New  York,  1864),  p.  2.     The  journey 
was  made  in  1835,   and  the  charming  book 
first  published  in  1844.     There  are  few  more 
sensitive  and  delightful  books  of  travel. 

3  In  the  excavations  on  the  site  of  Samaria 
conducted  by  representatives  of  Harvard  Uni- 
versity there  were  found  seventy-five  ostraca 
inscribed  in  the  Phoenician  character  in  the 

48 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  49 

period  of  Ahab,  king  of  Israel,  and  containing 
such  legends  as  this:  "In  the  tenth  year. 
From  Abiezer  to  Shemarjau.  A  jar  of  old 
wine  for  Asa.  From  the  hill."  D.  G.  Lyon, 
Hebrew  Ostraca  from  Samaria.  Harvard  Theo- 
logical Review,  January,  1911,  p.  136f. 

4  Many    thousands    of    the    inscribed    clay 
tablets  excavated  in  the  mounds  that  cover 
the  ancient  cities  of  Babylonia  and  Assyria 
deal  with  such  business  records  as  these.    The 
contribution  which  they  make  to  our  knowl- 
edge of  ancient  life  may  be  studied  in  C.  H. 
W.    Johns,    Babylonian   and   Assyrian   Laws, 
Contracts  and  Letters.    New  York,  1904.    A.  H. 
Sayce,  Babylonians  and  Assyrians,   Life  and 
Customs.     New  York,  1899. 

5  A  large  part  of  the  historical  literature  of 
the   Babylonians    and   Assyrians    consists   of 
boasts  of  conquests,  many  of  which  must  have 
been  exaggerated.     A  curious  instance  of  this 
is  found  in  the  accounts  of  the  first  campaign 
of  Shalmaneser  III   (B.  C.  859-825)  against 
the  West.     He  fought  with  a  body  of  raw 
levies  from  Hamath,  Damascus,  and  Israel, 
who  were  assisted  by  allies  from  Cilicia  and 
Cappadocia,    from    Phoenicia,    Arabia,    and 
Ammon.     Of  these  famous  victories  he  has 
left    us    four    separate    accounts.      Tho    first 
claims  that  he  slew  14,000  of  his  enemies,  the 
second   makes    their    loss    20,500,    the   third 
places  it  at  25,000,  and  the  fourth  increases  it 
to  29, 000.     See  the  original  texts  translated 
in    Rogers,    Cuneiform   Parallels    to    the   Old 
Testament,  New  York,  1912,  p.  289f. 

e  The  famous  law  code  of  the  Oriental  world 


50  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

is  the  Code  of  Hammurapi,  king  of  Babylon 
about  B.  C.  2000.  See  the  entire  code  trans- 
lated in  Rogers,  Cuneiform  Parallels,  p.  398f. 

7  Thomas  Moore. 

8  In  the  mass  of   material  now  continually 
printed  concerning  the  Old  and  New    Testa- 
ments we  are  sometimes  moved  to  forget  that 
all  learning  is  not  new.    Our  bibliographies, 
even  in  books  that  have  some  claim  to  scien- 
tific quality,  are  largely  restricted  to  books  of 
recent  date,  and  most  readers  are  led  to  the 
belief  that  before  our  advent  on  the  scene 
little  was  done  for  biblical  learning.     There 
could    scarcely    be    a    greater    fallacy.      For 
months  at  a  time  during  a  number  of  years 
I  have  had  the  pleasure  of  sitting  daily  at 
work   in   the    Duke   Humphrey's  library   of 
the   Bodleian    at    Oxford.     Before  me  stood 
great  lines  of  folios  from  the  fifteenth  to   the 
seventeenth  centuries,  commentaries  for  the 
most  part  upon  the  Old  and  New  Testaments. 
Much,  indeed,  of  their  contents  is  now  anti- 
quated, but  it  is  not  too  much  to  say  that 
many  new  discoveries  published  in  University 
theses  would  be  found  safely  reposing  within 
their    unopened    pages.     It    would   help  the 
modesty  of  some  of  us  to  read  the  books  of 
our  predecessors.      The  greater  repositories  of 
biography  and  bibliography  bristle  with  names, 
now  generally  unknown,  of  men  who  kept  the 
torch  alight  in  other  days.    The  number  of 
them  would  surprise  most  of  those  who  would 
turn  over  the  pages  of  the  twelve  volumes  of  the 
New  Schaff-Herzog  Encyclopedia   of  Religious 
Knowledge,  New  York,    1908-1912,   and   yet 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  51 

more  would  be  found  in  the  twenty-two  vol- 
umes of  the  Realencyklopddie  fur  protestantische 
Theologie  und  Kirche,  Leipzig,  1896-1909. 

9  Francesco    Petrarcha   (1304-1374),    whose 
ear  for  melody   caused   him   to   change   the 
uneuphonious  family  name  Petracco,  in  which 
he  was  born,  and  whose  rich  taste  made  him 
the  first  collector  of  manuscripts,  coins,  and 
inscriptions,  was  nobly  endowed  for  his  high 
mission.    Well  has  Voigt  (Die  Wiederbelebung 
des  Classischen  Alterthums,  i,  p.  23)  said  that 
his  "name  shines  as  a  star  of  the  first  magni- 
tude in  the  literary  and  intellectual  history 
of  the  world,  and  would  not  be  less  if  he  had 
never     written     a     verse     in     the     Tuscan 
language." 

10  Giovanni  Boccacio  (1313-1375),  unlike  his 
friend  Petrarch,  is  more  famous  for  his  own 
contribution    to    literature    (the     Decameron) 
than  for  his  devotion  to  the  recovery  of  the 
ancients.     From  him  Chaucer,  Spenser,   and 
Shakespeare  borrowed  stories. 

11  Desiderius    Erasmus    (1466-1536),    "the 
first  'man  of  letters'   who  had  appeared  in 
Europe  since  the  fall  of  the  Roman  empire." 
"Of  Erasmus's  works  the  Greek  Testament  is 
the  most  memorable.     It  has  no  title  to  be 
considered  as  a  work  of  learning  or  scholar- 
ship, yet  its  influence  upon  opinion  was  pro- 
found and  durable.     It  contributed  more  to 
the  liberation  of  the  human  mind  from  the 
thraldom  of  the  clergy  than  all  the  uproar 
and    rage    of    Luther's    many    pamphlets" 
(Allen). 

12  The  uncomplimentary  phrase  comes  from 


52  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

Jerome's  account  of  his  Hebrew  studies:  "I 
intrusted  myself  to  the  teaching  of  a  certain 
brother  who  had  been  converted  from  Ju- 
daism, that,  after  the  keen  intellect  of  Quin- 
tilian,  the  rivers  of  Cicero,  the  dignity  of 
Fronto,  the  gentleness  of  Pliny,  I  might 
learn  the  Hebrew  alphabet  and  con  its  strident 
and  panting  vocables.  My  conscience  and 
that  of  those  who  lived  with  me  is  witness  of 
all  the  labor  I  spent  on  that  study,  the  diffi- 
culty I  endured,  how  often  I  despaired,  how 
often  I  threw  up  the  study,  and  in  my  zeal 
took  it  up  again;  and  I  thank  God  that,  from 
the  bitter  seed,  I  cull  the  sweet  fruit  of 
literature." 

13Johann  Reuchlin  (1455-1522),  German 
humanist,  devout  and  faithful  Catholic,  Au- 
gustinian  monk  in  his  later  years,  "a  name 
only  second  to  that  of  his  younger  contem- 
porary Erasmus"  (Robertson  Smith). 

14  King  Henry  V,  Chorus  to  Act  I. 

15  Midsummer  Night's  Dream,  Act  V,  Scene  1. 

16  The  quaint  phrase  comes  from  Gregory's 
letter  to  a  friend  who  had  urged  him  to  under- 
take his  first  great  literary  work,  Expositio  in 
beatum  Job  sen  moralium  libri  XXV,  which 
he  used  to  call  his  Moralia,  a  book  that  served 
as  a  compendium  of  Ethics  in  the  Middle 
Ages.     Though  based  on  a  false  exegesis  and 
full  of  fantastic  examples  of  allegorical  inter- 
pretation, it,  nevertheless,  contains  nuggets  of 
gold,  and  well  deserved  to  be  translated  into 
English    by    a   modern    Hebraist    and    Saint 
(E.  B.  Pusey,  Lives  of  the  Fathers,  London, 
1838). 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  53 

17  John  Holland  Rose,   The  Life  of  Napo- 
leon I,  London,  1902,  i,  p.  182. 

18  The  full  title  of  this  monumental  work, 
which  first  acquainted  Europe  with  Egypt,  is 
Description  de  VEgypte,  ou  recueil   des   obser- 
vations  qui   out   ete  faites  en  Egypte   pendant 
r expedition  de     I'armee  franf aise  (37  volumes, 
Paris,  1820-1830). 

19  J.  P.  Mahaffy,  The  Empire  of  the  Ptole- 
mies   London,  1895.     Chapter  VIII,  with  an 
Appendix  containing  the  Greek  text  of  the 
Rosetta  Stone. 

20  The  Rosetta  Stone  is  now  exhibited  in  the 
Egyptian  Gallery,  No    24,  British  Museum. 
A  good  picture  of  it  may  be  seen  in  C.  J.  Ball, 
Light  from  the  East,   London,   1899,   p.   254, 
and  a  very  exact  reproduction  in  E.  A.  W. 
Budge,    The   Mummy,   Chapters  on  Egyptian 
Funeral  Archceology,  Cambridge,  1893,  p.  108. 
In  the  same  volume  is  a  most  interesting  ac- 
count of  the  process  of  decipherment,  with 
excellent  bibliographical  material. 

21  Hartleben,    Champollion   sein  Leben   und 
sein  Werk,  Berlin,  1906. 

..  M  C.  R.  Lepsius,  Denkmaler  aus  Agypten  und 
Athiopien,  Berlin,  1849-1859. 

23  J.  H.  Rose,  The  Life  of  Napoleon  I,  Lon- 
don, 1902,  i,  p.  196. 

24  This  thesis  came  first  to  Reuss  in  1833. 
It  is  interesting  to  note  how  long  a  time 
elapsed  before  it  secured  publicity.    Compare 
K.    Budde   und    H.    J.    Holtzmann,    Eduard 
Reuss9   Briefwechsel  mit  seinem  Schuler  und 
Freunde  K.  H.  Graf,  1904. 


54  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

25  Cplenso  had  an  eminent  predecessor  in 
the  view  which  he  felt  himself  required  to 
take   concerning   the   historical    character   of 
the  Pentateuch.     This  was  Wilhelm  Martin 
Leberecht  De  Wette,  whose  great  book  on 
Introduction    had    appeared    soon    after    the 
opening  of  the  century  (Beitrage  zur  Einleitung 
in  das  Alte   Testament,  I,  Historisch-kritische 
Untersuchung   uber   die   Bucher   der   Chronik, 
Halle,   1806;  II.  Kritik  der    mosaischen    Ge- 
schichte,  Halle,  1807).     De   Wette  perceived 
clearly    that    these    books    contained    rather 
"epic-poetic  memories  of  a  people  concerning 
its  past"  than  history,  but  his  book  made,  of 
course,  no  popular  impression  in  England,  and 
Colenso's  work  came  like  a  thunder  clap  out  of 
the  clear  sky. 

26  The  acceptance  of  these  results  in  Great 
Britain  was  slow,  and  in  America  yet  slower. 
The  first  great  contest  in  the  former  came 
in  the  person  of  William  Robertson  Smith, 
who    for    promulgating    them    in    his    article 
"The  Bible"  in  the  ninth  edition  of  the  En- 
cyclopedia Britannica  was  removed  from  his 
professorship    in    the    Free    Church    College, 
Aberdeen.     The  story  of  that  strange  con- 
troversy in  the  Presbytery,  Synod,  and  Gen- 
eral Assembly  of  the  Free  Church  of  Scotland 
has  only  now  been  fully  told  (John  Sutherland 
Black    and    George    Chrystal,    The    Life    of 
William  Robertson  Smith,  London,  1912),  and 
a  sad  story  it  is  of  a  real  intellectual  victory 
on  Smith's  part,   ending,  nevertheless,  in  a 
verdict  of  expediency  against  him.    Robertson 
Smith  triumphed  in  the  end  through  a  larger 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  55 

victory  in  public  opinion  and  in  a  course  of 
lectures  (W.  Robertson  Smith,  The  Old  Tes- 
tament in  the  Jewish  Church,  2nd  edition, 
London  and  Edinburgh,  1892)  prepared  the 
minds  of  men  for  a  wider  view  of  the  Scrip- 
tures. The  complete  change  from  open  hos- 
tility and  inhospitable  dread  of  biblical 
criticism  to  general  acceptance  owes  most  to 
the  tactful,  learned,  and  skillful  labors  of 
Professor  Samuel  Holies  Driver,  of  the  Uni- 
versity of  Oxford,  who  in  sermons,  lectures, 
popular  papers,  and  in  a  book  of  great  erudi- 
tion (S.  R.  Driver,  Introduction  to  the  Literature 
of  the  Old  Testament,  New  York,  1891-1911, 
numerous  editions)  has  wrought  a  great  and 
beneficent  revolution.  In  America  the  pio- 
neers were  Charles  Augustus  Briggs,  Henry 
Preserved  Smith,  and  Francis  Brown  in  the 
Presbyterian  Church,  and  Milton  S.  Terry  and 
Hinckley  G.  Mitchell  in  the  Methodist  Epis- 
copal Church.  Briggs,  Smith,  and  Mitchell 
suffered  ecclesiastical  penalties  for  their  labors, 
as  had  Robertson  Smith  before  them. 

27  Fundgraben   des   Orients,    bearbeitet   durch 
eine  Gesellschaft  von  Liebhabern,  Wien,  1813, 
p.  129.     The  narrative  of  Rich  is  comprised 
in  pages   129-162,   and  also  pages   197-200. 
The    former    are    reprinted    by    his    widow, 
Narrative  of  a  Journey  to  the  Site  of  Babylon 
in   1821,   now  first   published,   etc.,    London, 
1839. 

28  John  P.  Peters,  Nippur,  New  York,  1897. 

29  Extended    accounts   of   these    and   other 
excavations    may    be    found    in    Robert    W. 
Rogers,    History    of   Babylonia    and   Assyria, 


56  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

New  York  1900,  Vol.  I,  and  in  Hermann  V. 
Hilprecht,  Explorations  in  Bible  Lands  during 
the  Nineteenth  Century,  Philadelphia,  1903. 

80  Friedrich    Delitzsch,  born    September  3, 
1850,   son   of   Franz   Delitzsch,   the   eminent 
Hebraist   and   Old   Testament   commentator, 
began  his  career  at  Leipzig,  where  his  dis- 
tinguished  father   was   professor,    and   after- 
ward was  professor  of  Assyriology  in  Breslau. 
He  is  now  professor  in  Berlin,  and  director  of 
the  Museum  of  the  Antiquities  of  Western 
Asia.    His  Assyrian  Grammar,  Dictionary,  and 
Chrestomathy  are  the  standard  books  of  in- 
struction in  the  science,  and  his  pupils  are 
everywhere,  among  them  Professors  Heinrich 
Zimmern  in  Leipzig,  Peter  Jensen  in  Marburg, 
David  Gordon  Lyon  in  Cambridge,  Robert 
Francis  Harper  in  Chicago,   Carl  Bezold  in 
Heidelberg,  Paul  Haupt  in  Baltimore,  F.  H. 
Weissbach    in    Leipzig,    and    many    others, 
among  whom  also  the  present  writer  is  happy 
to  be  enumerated,  and  glad  to  pay  this  small 
tribute  to  a  kind  and  generous  teacher. 

81  A  larger  account  of  the  whole  process  of 
decipherment,  with  illustrative  plates  of  the 
inscriptions    will    be    found    in    Robert    W. 
Rogers,    History    of  Babylonia    and   Assyria, 
New  York,  1900,  Vol.  I,  and  in  Arthur  John 
Booth,  The  Discovery  and  Decipherment  of  the 
Trilingual    Cuneiform    Inscriptions,    London, 
1902. 

82  This  famous  inscription  is  translated  in 
Robert  W.  Rogers,  Cuneiform  Parallels  to  the 
Old  Testament,  New  York,  1912,  pp.  294ff. 

38  The  bearing  of  these  discoveries  upon  the 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  57 

religion  of  the  Hebrew  people  is  discussed  in 
Robert  W.  Rogers,  The  Religion  of  Babylonia 
and  Assyria,  especially  in  its  Relations  to 
Israel,  New  York,  1908. 

34  John  Milton,  Paradise  Regained,  iv,  240, 
241. 


BOOKS  BY 
PROFESSOR  ROBERT  W.  ROGERS 

HISTORY  OF  BABYLONIA  AND  ASSYRIA. 
Seventh  Edition.  Two  volumes,  large 
octavo,  bound  in  cloth,  gilt  tops.  Price, 
$500. 

I  have  long  been  acquainted  with  Professor  R.  W. 
Rogers'  History  of  Babylonia  and  Assyria.  I  have 
used  it  perpetually  and  recommend  it  as  the  best 
available  book  on  the  subject.  The  clear  style  of 
exposition,  the  full  acquaintance  with  facts,  combined 
with  a  sound  and  sober  view  of  historical  canons  of 
evidence,  render  it  a  first  rate  type  of  history. — 
C.  H.  W.  JOHNS,  Master  of  Saint  Catherine's  College, 
Cambridge;  Lecturer  on  Assyriology,  University  of 
Cambridge  and  at  King's  College,  University  of 
London. 

The  History  of  Babylonia  and  Assyria  by  Professor 
Robert  William  Rogers  puts  the  entire  body  of  his- 
torical readers  under  obligation  to  its  author.  .  .  . 
Rawlinson  is  to-day  only  a  step  less  outdated  than 
Rollin.  These  records  of  3,500  years  of  the  race,  or 
twice  the  Christian  era,  lie  scattered  in  hundreds  of 
publications,  a  great  library  of  deciphered  inscrip- 
tions, not  easily  grasped  even  by  professional  students. 
Professor  Rogers  has  done  the  inestimable  service  of 
collating  this  vast  mass.  ...  In  a  work  to 
which  for  years  to  come  the  general  reader  and  the 
student  will  turn  he  has  marshaled  in  order  the  suc- 
cession of  the  races,  dynasties,  kings,  and  the  events 
of  their  reigns.  ...  A  constant  and  personal 
reference  to  original  authorities  marks  all  this  work, 
which  places  its  author  among  the  few  who  have 
made  this  vast  field  accessible  to  the  general  public. 
American  scholarship  has  a  new  achievement  of  the 
first  usefulness  in  these  volumes. — TALCOTT  WILLIAMS, 
LL.D.,  Dean,  Columbia  University,  New  York. 
58 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  59 

THE  RELIGION  OF  BABYLONIA  AND  ASSYRIA, 
ESPECIALLY  IN  ITS  RELATIONS  TO  ISRAEL. 
Five  lectures  delivered  at  Harvard  Uni- 
versity. Beautifully  illustrated.  Large 
octavo,  bound  in  red  cloth,  gilt  top, 
library  style.  Price,  $2.00,  net. 

Brief  yet  first-hand  accounts  of  the  ancient  religions 
with  which  Israel  in  the  course  of  its  history  was 
brought  into  relation  have  been  among  the  pressing 
needs  of  students  of  the  Old  Testament.  So  far  as 
one  of  the  most  important  of  these  religions  is  con- 
cerned, the  need  is  most  admirably  met  by  Professor 
Rogers'  Religion  of  Babylonia  and  Assyria.  The 
accurate  knowledge  of  the  scholar  is  set  forth  with 
the  skill  that  is  the  fruit  of  wide  and  varied  experience 
as  a  teacher  both  in  America  and  England.  Professor 
Rogers  had  already  done  good  service  to  the  cause  of 
learning  by  his  History  of  Babylonia  and  Assyria. 
The  new  volume,  owing  to  its  briefer  treatment  and 
more  special  subject,  should  meet  the  needs  of  a 
larger  circle  of  readers,  who  will  thus  be  enabled  by 
comparison  to  gain  a  more  intelligent  appreciation 
of  the  Jewish  Religion  and  of  the  Old  Testament 
Scriptures. — G.  BUCHANAN  GRAY,  Litt.D.,  D.D.,  Pro- 
fessor of  Hebrew  and  Old  Testament  Exegesis,  Mans- 
field College,  Oxford.  Author  of  a  Commentary  on 
Numbers;  Hebrew  Proper  Names;  The  Divine  Discipline 
of  Israel,  etc. 

I  congratulate  you  and  the  printer  on  the  admirable 
form  of  the  volume.  I  am  pleased  that  our  Summer 
School  has  called  forth  such  a  work.  And  I  congratu- 
late you  on  the  saneness  of  view  and  the  excellence  of 
style  of  your  description;  you  prove  that  a  history 
of  an  ancient  religion  may  be  "not  harsh  and  crabbed 
as  dull  fools  suppose,  but  musical  as  is  Apollo's  lute." 
You  have  infused  life  into  the  old  story — not  a  small 
triumph.  You  have  made  a  book  that  everybody 
may  read  with  pleasure  and  profit;  I  hope  it  will 
bring  the  knowledge  of  the  old  religion  to  many  for 
whom  it  has  been  only  a  name. — CRAWFORD  H.  TOY, 
Ph.D.,  LL.D.,  Sometime  Hancock  Professor  of  Hebrew 
and  other  Oriental  Languages,  Harvard  University. 


60  THE  RECOVERY  OF 

CUNEIFORM  PARALLELS  TO  THE  OLD  TESTA- 
MENT. Large  octavo,  bound  in  red  cloth, 
gilt  top,  library  style.  Richly  illustrated 
with  many  copies  of  cuneiform  monu- 
ments. Price,  $4.50,  net. 

This  book  contains  translations  of  all  the  Baby- 
lonian, Assyrian,  and  Persian  inscriptions,  mytho- 
logical, chronological,  historical,  and  legal  which  are 
parallel  with  or  illustrative  of  the  Old  Testament, 
with  notes  and  introductions. 

I  congratulate  you  most  warmly  upon  its  comple- 
tion. I  shall  value  it  greatly  and  constantly  use  it: 
the  materials  are  ^ust  what  are  wanted,  and  so  con* 
veniently  arranged:  I  am  particularly  glad  also  that 
you  have  found  room  for  the  transliterations.  It 
will,  I  feel  sure,  become  the  standard  work  of  reference 
on  the  subject,  and  be  widely  used  by  students. — • 
SAMUEL  R.  DRIVER,  D.D.,  Litt.D.,  Regius  Professor 
of  Hebrew  and  Canon  of  Christ  Church,  Oxford, 
England.  Author  of  Commentaries  on  Deuteronomy, 
Daniel,  Joel,  Amos,  and  Jeremiah,  etc.,  etc. 

In  his  admirable  work,  Cuneiform  Parallels  to  the 
Old  Testament,  Professor  R.  W.  Rogers  has  collected 
all,  or  nearly  all,  of  the  passages  occurring  in  Baby- 
lonian-Assyrian and  classical  literature  which  have 
any  bearing  upon  the  Old  Testament,  and  has  made 
them  available  to  every  biblical  student  by  means  of 
careful  and  scholarly  translations.  The  completeness 
with  which  the  materials  have  been  brought  together 
forms  a  distinguishing  feature  of  the  book,  which 
does  not  merely,  like  Schrader's  Cuneiform  Inscrip- 
tions and  the  Old  Testament,  aim  at  illustrating  and 
elucidating  biblical  passages  by  disconnected  references 
to  Cuneiform  literature,  but,  rather,  strives  to  present 
as  a  whole  certain  subjects  or  groups  of  subjects  be- 
longing to  that  literature  touched  upon  in  the  Old 
Testament.  It  will,  therefore,  be  of  scarcely  less  use 
to  the  Assyriologist  than  to  the  biblical  student. — 
RUDOLF  E.  BRUNNOW,  Ph.D.,  Professor  of  Semitic 
Philology,  Princeton  University. 


THE  ANCIENT  ORIENT  61 

One  cannot  help  being  sincerely  delighted  with  Pro- 
fessor Rogers'  splendid  edition  of  Cuneiform  Parallels 
to  the  Old  Testament,  for  we  have  greatly  needed  such 
a  book  for  a  long  time.  The  important  parallels  from 
Babylonian  and  Assyrian  literature  are  collected  here 
and  edited  in  an  admirable  manner.  Careful  and  re- 
liable translations  of  the  various  documents  with  the 
original  text  in  transcription,  are  given  with  brief, 
pointed  introductions.  The  plan  of  the  book  is  well 
conceived  and  ably  executed.  Altogether  it  is  a  work 
which  is  destined  to  become  indispensable  and  of 
which  American  scholarship  may  justly  be  proud. — 
JULIUS  A.  BEWER,  Ph.D.,  Professor  of  Hebrew  and 
Cognate  Languages  in  Union  Theological  Seminary, 
New  York. 

DEAR  PROFESSOR  ROGERS: — I  heartily  congratulate 
you  upon  the  appearance  of  your  great  book,  Cunei- 
form Parallels  to  the  Old  Testament.  The  preparation 
of  such  books  has  been  left  too  long  to  the  Germans. 
You  have  placed  all  English-speaking  students  of  the 
Bible  and  of  antiquity  under  obligation  by  producing 
in  English  an  original  help  of  such  importance.  Only 
Assyriologists  can,  however,  fully  appreciate  the  diffi- 
culties of  your  task  and  understand  the  full  measure 
of  your  success  in  overcoming  them.  The  book  should 
find  its  way  into  every  important  library,  as  well  as 
into  the  hands  of  all  pastors  and  serious  students  of 
the  Bible.  With  personal  thanks,  I  am,  cordially 
yours,  GEORGE  A.  BARTON,  Doctor  of  Philosophy  and 
Professor  in  Bryn  Mawr  College,  Pennsylvania. 


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